Pockets Full of Time
by Socks-Chan
Summary: Kakashi is still Kakashi, even when he's old. This is about his memories, and the tragedy of his life, and the over all feeling of guilt he has when no one's looking...


A Pocket Full of Time

By Socks-chan

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto. I don't own anything. Except my copy of Kill Bill. u.u... And this story. So don't steal it. Or...I'll give you cancer oo

Summary: Just a short remeniscence on Kakashi's part. He remembers the only team he ever passed, and prepares his heart for another year without them. It's dedicated to Shoes-chan, because she loves Kakashi, and she consented to do Kakashi x Sakura Rp with me 3

Kakashi sighed into his coffee, the steam rising up like ashes to soak into his mask, and thus into his nose, the water being lost in the fabric, and left to cool uncomfortably. He'd been there for hours, his lanky, scarecrow-like figure solitary and compressed at the bar where he sat, his long fingers pressed to the hot ceramic of his cup in a gesture of masochism, fingertips pink and tender, and throbbing like an infection. It's a cold Saturday evening in December, when winter starts to get old, and the snow is dirty. It's a time of year when children don't want to play outside anymore, and dream of spring with a feeling that might be heart-ache. Kakashi is an old man now, old, and tired, though he doesn't look it. It's been twenty years since that day, near the monument, with the bells, where he met the first, and last team he ever passed. Their faces swim on the surface of his mind like fish in dark water, rippling his peace, and travelling down his aorta into the flesh of his heart where they eat him alive, cherry filling leaking between their teeth. He sets aside this day; the entire day, every year, in order to do this. It keeps him sane, it keeps him alive, and it hurts, but he supposes he could do much worse, and continues on as he's always done with nothing but his memories.

He could still remember them, remember talking to them, and sharing their dreams. He remembers all of them in detail, the kind of detail you can only get from injecting colors straight into the folds of your brain, and holding them to yourself until they mix with your blood, a swirling rainbow of memories, like jello, melting on the sidewalk when you were a kid, or those orange popsicles that used to be so cold you'd hurt your teeth. He can almost hear them, as if at any moment, he'll turn around, the wrinkles that no one notices at the corners of his eyes, and his mouth, under the mask and hidden behind his knees where only he can see them, will melt away, and he'll be back in that time; in a time when he didn't hear his joints creaking like old age come to call, and bringing with it, images of youth, running down the street until your legs screamed and you could feel the air clawing at your lungs, soles of little feet burning on the scalding pavement, and splitting with the force of movement that you could recal at a whim. Back to a time where sunshine meant happiness, and not just day light, a time when you got up early in the morning, instead of staying up late, a time when you spent summers and winters outside, playing in snow and leaves, and grass. And oh, how he remembers them, like he remembers his own easy movement, the dance of metal across his fingers when he was young, and Obito's voice, the voice of the only best friend he'd ever had.

When he remembers Sasuke, he remembers a kid with missing pieces, a boy all dark colors and intense eyes. He remembers that something was missing, something he couldn't put a name to; a shadow out of place in the whorls of his ear, and the spaces between his fingers, a wrongness that somehow represented all that the young Uchiha stood for. When he remembered Sasuke, he remembered the thirst for power, and the aching thirst for redemption that crawled along the boy's skin like disease, or electricity, or anything dangerous and painful to the touch. Sometimes when he thinks of him, he thinks of those eyes, swirling like a dizzying panorama of motion and color, two colors, black and red that swirled together faster than the eye could recognize them, save for in little flashes here and there, where the optical illusion of stillness grabbed on and wouldn't let go. He remembers the delicate spectrum of emotion that the Uchiha boy held on to, the small smiles, the creases above his eyes when he was happy, and the delicate fall of hair that could portray so much about what he wasn't feeling. He couldn't see inside of the boy's skin, not because he was complex, but because the boy wore so much of his pain on the outside, in the thick lines that defined him, and differentiated him from his surroundings, the black ink that made up his eyes and hair, and shadows, misplaced though they may be. Sasuke was a ceramic figure, crazy glued together by the hands of children, small fingers sticking to ragged surfaces, pressing the breaks together, leaving skin behind in the haste to heal. He was a tell-tale heart that made no sound, a murder scene drenched in blood with a tiny hand in the center, that made you want to scream until your ribs cracked, and you died. Sasuke was painted in definition, like caligraphy, with a perfect face, and perfect hues. But like a drawing, like that figurine, put together save for the missing piece at it's breast, it had no heart. He had no heart. Until Naruto gave him half of his, cut in half like a pommegranite, seeds spilling out into Sakura's hands. They both, with bloody, sticky digits shoved the seeds into Sasuke's broken chest, cutting their fingers on the sharp edges of the hole of the missing piece in his ceramic chest, and held him, his new heart of pulpy pommegranite seeds and blood beating with their pain, with their hope for him.

He remembers Naruto as well. All bright smiles, sunny hair, and the pain hidden under his eyelids, in the pupil of his sky blue eye. The son of Yondaime, a feared creature for the village, and their savior as well. He remembers the loud, obnoxious voice over the softer one that cried "Hear me. I want to live. I want people to know. I exist!". When he bothered to look at Naruto, which wasn't often, he felt like his eyes were too strong, too precise to see the skin of the boy, but rather looked into his head, into the space of his skull, to watch the little silver gears crank and turn, constantly moving, twitching like muscle fibers stimulated by electricity and panic. He felt that he could disect the boy like a toad, and pin his pieces together, force them into a cohesion of juice, and flesh, and pain that couldn't break apart because it yearned for it's other pieces. Except for his hands. Even Kakashi never could see inside of Naruto's hands, because they were strong, and they were perfect, though they should be scarred. He had the feeling that Naruto remembered where each injury had been, remembered perfectly in a mocking testament to the evil creature in his belly. He remembers that cardboard smile that seems flat, and pointed at the edges, as if Naruto could take it off, and leave it behind. It had never been a part of him. He was stubborn. He was a good person. But he wasn't perfect, he was awkward. Naruto was only Naruto, A smudge on a test paper left behind by a bad eraser, and unfortunate paper quality. He was the drawing of a three year old, that pulls lines to itself, tries to be defined in a way that it can understand so that it won't burst apart like a cake with purple and white frosting, orange confetti exploding outward. It had been up to Naruto to take in hand the crayons, and outline himself. It was messy. He had been too young to stay in the lines, and didn't even understand the meaning of those lines, for he'd had no one to teach him, so his outline was dark, and gone over repeatedly in different clashing colors. It was Sasuke that helped him, roughly cutting away the square outline with scissors too big for his hands, into something Naruto shaped, something that could move without the baggage of his past. Sakura didn't say anything as she applied the scotch tape to Sasuke's mistakes, as she sliced her fingers on the tape dispenser leaving little dots of lip gloss, strawberry blood that stained his edges. Sasuke smiled as he put lime green bandaids over the hole in Naruto's paper body, covering it completely.

And as for Sakura, the girl with the candy colored hair, and an origami, perpetual motion brain. Whose smile sounded like folding paper and clattering china. He could hear her voice, the decibles and pitches that made up her words a beautiful cacophany of rhythm and discordant notes. Early in life she'd been looked down apon by the other little girls, until she found a friend; like a pebble that stays on the ground, alone in the middle of a path until someone picks it up and rubs it between their fingers. But like so many people who traverse the spaces between nothing and something, she'd forgotton the pain that lonliness brings, the pain and chill, like cold winter mornings, when kindergarteners from the local catholic school stand outside playing clapping games, in thin little jackets that don't warm them. She'd been different always, from the edges of her figure, to the places where her weariness showed, at the neck line of her dress, and in between her bare toes that she'd wiggle in the water, leaning against vertigo and her male team mate's shoulders. And she was in pain. Pain that wouldn't go away, even when she screamed until she couldn't make a sound, with nothing to hear her. And when she'd be silent, and hide herself inside the cracks in her green eyes, or behind her own ears, behind a rain of candy pink hair, eyes glassy as buttons. She may have been the saddest of all, because she had only hatred for herself, hatred that crawled up from her cuticles, and down to her bones, between the nerve synapses, jittering along her being in a movement like dying. The pieces of Sakura were in tatters, different colors of fabric patterned with dots and spirals and all manner of things with multi colored , broken pieces of buttons sewn into the scraps, and hooked together. When they found her, they were insensitive, rough, as boys can be. Sasuke's jagged edges cut into her, making her bleed strawberry lip gloss blood, and Naruto's construction paper hands were rough, and grated against her 200 thread-count skin. Naruto held the needle, painstakingly sewing her together with the love and talentlessness only an adorant young child can produce, and Sasuke continued to hurt her, though he tried to be gentle. They collected all of her parts, and pieced her together like a rag doll, one eye lower than the other, one arm shorter, legs of different colors. Naruto only smiled, despite the fact that his clumbsy handling of the needle pushed it through his own paper hands, and Sakura loved him for it in ways she couldn't understand. Sasuke stroked her ugly, coarse yarn hair, and held the little pieces of glass, and scraps of paper while Naruto weaved his own piece of messy fabric into the hole at her chest. However it was Sasuke who glued the glass and paper to the ugly fabric, giving her pieces of them to make a ragged, lovely heart for her.

He remembered, the days that they died, each in the perfect detail that the Sharingan assured, like a digital image of things he wanted to forget, the kinds of things that the human brain refuses to see at first glance, but that become more and more clear every time you try to escape, to look away, to stop it any way you can, until finally you know, and you still can't look away.

Flash

Kakashi looked down, weak spring sunlight hurting his eyes, and pulling apart his optic nerve as the surroundings shoved themselves into his corneas. Everything faded to black and white as he tried not to make sense of the big things, concentrating instead on small, minute details that became hooks to hold his brain together, though it wanted to explode in millions of colors, and tiny fruit flavored shapes with a prize inside that ensures a lifetime guarantee. He can smell the grass, and rotting leaves at his feet, mixed with the smell of blood, and inner fluids that he's become so used to, a smell with the familiarity of mother's home cooking, or the neighborhood you grew up in. He can feel the little details falling away as his brain tries to process the information he refuses to believe, repelling it like oil to water, or rhapsody to the wicked. He can feel the doubt crawling along the nerves in his hands, which twitch, twitch twitch twich, and refuse to remain still, shaking, shaking like his world is coming apart. He can feel the little pieces of his skull fall and leave impressions in the ground that fill with blue koolaid, and run over, submerging his feet in a toxic wasteland that burns, and erodes his sandals, running between his toes, or what's left of them to his calcaneal tendon, and up his back into his brain again.

"Well Sasuke..."

Sasuke didn't answer from his position, intertwined with his brother, their faces a distorted reflection, one of the other, and the other of one, in a scene that made Kakashi feel hot and dizzy, like he'd spun around in circles, arms wide, a gesture like forgiveness or exaltation, spinning, spinning until all of the colors of the world mixed into brown, his ears screaming as he lost all sense of what he was. He was alternately hot and freezing, though he could feel neither the the fevered sweat at his brow, nor the debilitating shivers that wracked his body as all function, all thought, all consciousness of anything was taken over by the spaces between his heartbeat.

"Itachi..."

Their viscera was wet, glistening in the weak sunlight, and his eyes hurt to look at it, and the sight made his skin tingle, and want to crawl off, retreat to some hidden hole where it could scream, or die, or do whatever it is that skin does in it's free time. He didn't want to know why they both lay dead, embraced like brothers at last, though to know it would have made both of them sick, and caused them to retch up the little pieces of past they had in common, and burry them, hiding them under Konoha where no one would look, except maybe their mother, who was dead, and still calling them in for dinner, screaming when they wouldn't listen, so loud that Kakashi wished she'd die, or shut up, or go away. Something.

"See where your foolishness has gotten us...Appologize now...Okay...That's better."

/I pray to God my soul to eat--/

flash

It was a sunny day, and Kakashi hates it, hates the sparkling rays of light that settled on the blood soaked clearing near the monument carved with the names of so many fallen. He hates the way the small splatters of blood had clotted in the indented characters, and left sticky, life residue where only the dead belonged. He wanted to scrub at it, like a housewife who worked until her fingers cracked from using too much bleach in an attempt to add a little of something she knew. He could feel all eyes apon him, his own eyes apon a small white figure, a figure he could only bear to see in black and white, lest he see the distorted color of her hair, the pink color washed out by the dirty red brown of drying blood, and dirt, with little pieces of grass mixed among the clumping strands. Her eyes, the color of chunks of glass left in a parking lot where beer bottles have been smashed, glittering, green gravel with danger written at every point. Her smile was peaceful, a small curve, lips still pink and expressive, even in stillness, even in death. Her throat opened like a monstrous flower, a piece of art that consisted of sections of a grapefruit, with clumps of white sugar, and meaty tendon interspersed, red like a burn, with grass sticking to the surface like the water of some sick fishbowl, that could suck him into hell.

_Sakura..._

"Cause of death, unknown."

"It's 10:00 A.M. I'm calling it."  
"--Found the weapon nearby"  
"--most likely suicide--"

"Probably from the sudden death of the Uchiha--"

"Hokage-sama will be devestated..."

_...Fuck..._

/Now I lay me down to sleep--/

"Rigor Mortis has already set in--"

"--victim's heart is missing. She's apparently been brutalized. We'll have to check for body fluids before--"

_Get up Sakura, say it's a joke...Time to wake up now..._

But Kakashi knew it was no use. Just as he'd felt it, Sakura had been aware of their simultaneous deaths as they happend. Been aware and died smiling.

Flash

Naruto was the only one who remained whole, out of all three of them, he would think later, as he sat silent near the monument, picking apart his fingers until they bled, little chunks of sanity dripping from his body and floating in the air like dandelion tufts. He lay, dull and perfect on the ground, only the pale winter sky to light his peaceful face. On the ground he lay, unmoving, though snow settled among his red and white robes, and in his cupped palms, falling through slightly parted fingers, and in the bowl of the hat that proclaimed him as Hokage, the title he'd wanted for so long, and worked so hard to get. Kakashi hated him in that moment, hated him for dying just as he'd gotten his dream. Kakashi imagined shaking him, violently shaking the blond head until it fell off, the screws connecting it weakened by rust and rain, the cogs falling out of the cradle in the fox-boy's skull. He imagined burrowing his hands into his gut, and ripping out the Kyuubi, screaming "WHAT THE FUCK!". He didn't do that though. He watched. Watched as the little fragments of glass that made up his world started to melt around the edges until he could only see in dots of color that fizzed, and died slowly. He reached out, and touched one of the boy's hands. It was still warm, the nails hard, the hands strong and perfect as always, though he knew the boy hated them, and wished they were more like his own, or Jiraiya's; Anyones, just so long as they could be normal. Kakashi almost cried as he paused, eyes flicking to Naruto's palm as if it held a beacon, a way to bring him home to them, a sign, anything that could mean something to the distraught man, anything to take away the pain. Instead he saw only the symbol of Konoha tattooed into the youth's palm.

/If I should Die before I wake.../

Flash

Kakashi stands still, feet burried in the snow, looking at the monument. He still holds the cup of cold coffee in his hand, and he vaguely remembers that he "Forgot" to pay for it. He supposes it doesn't matter much now. One big hand sets it down, like a covenant from God, striding forward on stiff legs to set his other hand on the top of the monument, his constant companion, and friend, like a ghost of who he never was. Everyone he loves is symbolized by this damn piece of rock, he thinks wryly, smiling under his mask, though it's not really a smile, because he'd never been good with those, and they always felt sticky on his face, as if he'd used too much glue. He opens his hands, and they hurt, the ligaments stiff with years of mistreatment, and hours of dissuse, or maybe it's the other way around, because everything's getting fuzzy, and he can't seem to recall very well anymore. The full moon is up, watching him like an eye as it passes through the heavens, mocking him, opening it's mouth and drooling stars that sprinkle onto his head and burn his neck, poking holes in his hair. Everything around him seems to speed up, the sky lightening, and suddenly, he starts to cry, because he can smell Sakura's shampoo, and feel the weight of Sasuke's aura at his back, and see Naruto in his Hokage uniform slipping through the chuunin body guards that are assigned to keep him in his office. And he can see Yondaime beyond him, and Rin, and hears Obito's voice calling to him. He closes his eyes, and the sky disappears, but they're still there, beneath his eyelids, carrying him home on the wings of flying turtles that he can hear, clicking together in the background like dog claws on a wooden floor. He breathes in, and it all becomes summer, and he's young again, but they still love him, and embrace him, and he doesn't feel guilty anymore...

/I pray the lord my soul to take/

The next morning, patrolling ANBU reported the body of Hatake Kakashi sitting in front of the Konoha Monument. On trying to rouse him, they found only a stiff corpse. The general consensus was that the older man had simply gotten tired, and sat down for a rest, never to rise again. Many of the older and younger Shinobi expressed deep sorrow at the death of one so revered, though one man, A man whose usual loud voice was quiet that day, Who knew Kakashi like a brother slouching toward eternity, saw what had really happened, but didn't say a word, because Kakashi had been forgiven, and that was what was important.


End file.
